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I wish to learn the advantage of a DAC. I had a PM6002 once and loved the sound ( though I craved for even better sound). I used my ex-amp with CD5001 ( this just died). How much difference would I have experienced if I had just replaced 6002 with 6005. The other point is if I go for a CD6005/PM6005 combo now, will my experience be vastly different from my CD5001/PM6002 experience? Thanks

A lot of devices are actually fitted with DACs, computers, phones, MP3 players. The advantage of a seperate DAC is that they are generally of a much better standard than those that exist within your digital devices and thus reproduce sound at a much better quality. For example, my MacBook has headphone out (analog output) and my audio files are obviously all digital. I CAN connect my headphones directly in and hear the music, and it sounds decent enough, but when I connect it via USB to the DAC in my Audiolab 8200CD, the difference is pretty outstanding. Instead of using the analog output, the information is transmitted digitally via the USB and the DAC of the CD player converts it instead, and does a substantially better job of it.

You'd probably get better results connecting the PM6005 and CD6005 conventionally with RCA leads (utilising the CD player's own DAC) and use the PM6005's built-in DAC for added flexibility (like plugging in an optical cable from your TV/BDP or an ATV3 for AirPlay if that's your thing).

I doubt very much that the PM6005 has a better DAC than your CD6005 already uses.

I doubt very much that the PM6005 has a better DAC than your CD6005 already uses.

Sure we had a similar conversation a few weeks ago and the conclusion was the DACs were the same, so shouldn't sound any different. If that's the casse there may be an argument for connecting digitally to avoid interference on the connection (although that's pretty unlikely anyway).

I doubt very much that the PM6005 has a better DAC than your CD6005 already uses.

Sure we had a similar conversation a few weeks ago and the conclusion was the DACs were the same, so shouldn't sound any different. If that's the casse there may be an argument for connecting digitally to avoid interference on the connection (although that's pretty unlikely anyway).

If the dacs are, and perform the same, then use the one in the player.

The dac is closer to the source and the clock so should be more accurate in that respect and connecting via spdif can introduce jitter which makes it more difficult for the dac in the amplifier to reconstruct the clock accurately.

This is totally theoretical though, I would be very surprised if a difference could be heard that was not down to different playback levels.

Do you really want a CD player??? I would look at getting the PM6005, but instead of a CD player maybe get a Sonos Connect and hook it up to the amp's DAC. Of-course a bit of extra expense would be incurred by having to purchase a NAS, ideally, or you could play back from your PC.

Thank you Traxman, Appreciate your post...so better the DAC is better the quality of the sound. So basically while there may be little to differentiate between the base capabilities of PM6002 and PM6005, the DAC of latter makes music more refined and enjoyable.

So would connecting the PM6005 DAC to a laptop just by the normal laptop headphone port be far less effective than getting a USB DAC and connecting it to the laptop that way? There are some good deals on the PM6005 so I'd like to get it but then I only want a DAC if I can connect it to my PC and get the most out of the lossless files I have stored on it.

Ok another point to learn here for me is that for sheer music enjoyment player DAC takes precedence over the amplifier DAC...right?

No, you can't draw that conclusion at all, in this case (PM/CD6005) there will likely be no audible difference between the two. Any other case will depend on the quality of the DAC in the two components, if you have a £50 CD player and £1500 digital integrated amp then the amp's DAC is likely to be far superior to the CD player.

Along these lines, is it possible to disengage a players DAC in order to use the better DAC of a (hypothetically) costlier amp. Sometime ago i was told that an external DAC was not a solution to improve the sound of my then existant system CD5001/ PM6002...I wonder if that was a right view.

Along these lines, is it possible to disengage a players DAC in order to use the better DAC of a (hypothetically) costlier amp. Sometime ago i was told that an external DAC was not a solution to improve the sound of my then existant system CD5001/ PM6002...I wonder if that was a right view.

You don't disengage a CD player's DAC as such but if the CD player offers a digital output (and not all of them do) then using that instead of the analogue outputs will bypass the CD player's DAC stage.

Along these lines, is it possible to disengage a players DAC in order to use the better DAC of a (hypothetically) costlier amp. Sometime ago i was told that an external DAC was not a solution to improve the sound of my then existant system CD5001/ PM6002...I wonder if that was a right view.

You don't disengage a CD player's DAC as such but if the CD player offers a digital output (and not all of them do) then using that instead of the analogue outputs will bypass the CD player's DAC stage.

In this (the most usual) case you are balancing different ways of getting an improvement against each other.

The separete dac can be of better quality, have a better separate (from the CD player) power supply and other factors that may make it better than the dac in the player.

On the other hand the dac in the player is close to the master clock and the digital signal does not have to be 'packaged' to be sent over the spdif interface, a big advantage.

I rarely found an outboard dac to add much to a CD player but of course it offered an improvement for a relatively modest cost, at least that is what the marketing said.

Like the use of an extra power amp for 'bi-amping' the add on dac was and attractive proposition, as a concept anyway. The fact that, more often than not it did very little for the capability of the system seems to have gone un-noticed among all the hype.